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Mother’s Mortal Mistake: Freak Accidents on the Westering Trails

Risen bread dough in a rectangular tin pan. — Public Domain

Joel Hills Johnson started east from Salt Lake City along the combined California and Mormon Trail in April 1857, on his way to serve a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On Big Mountain, less than 20 miles from the city, his group overtook a party of “apostates” – former Mormon converts who had abandoned their church and were leaving the Mormon realm. As was common practice, a mother of that party had stirred together a pan of bread dough in the morning and set it to rise in the wagon during the day. Johnson recorded:

We found in an apostate camp a little girl about 16 months old, smothered to death by having a pan of dough turned over her head while asleep, by the rock of wagons coming down the mountain. She was rolled up in a buffalo skin, and buried high upon the side of the mountain.

Johnson, a composer of hymns, wrote the child an epitaph:

Rest little stranger, sweetly rest Beneath the mountain snow
Where no intruder can molest Or any earthly foe.
Sweet, lovely babe, thou here must lay High on the mountaintop
And sleep the lonely years away ‘Till Michael wakes thee up.

The exact location of the baby’s unmarked grave is not known today.